10,000 domains registered in Armenia in 2008

YEREVAN, January 20. /ARKA/. The number of domains registered in Armenia had approximated 10,000 by the end of last year – an increase of 30% as compared with 2007.

Igor Mkrtumyan, President of the Internet Community NGO, reported a two-fold increase in the number of domains in 2008 as compared with 2005 and a four-fold increase as compared with 2001.

At present, 3.25 domains per 1,000 people are registered in Armenia against the average of 32.5 in Europe. Mkrtumyan pointed out that 55,000 domains are officially registered in Latvia, and 94,000 in Lithuania.

According to him, the situation in Armenia is indirect evidence of the state of small and medium-sized businesses in the country.
“Small and medium-sized enterprises worldwide are trying to open their Internet domains for prospective customers to be fully informed of their activities,” Mkrtumyan.

In Armenia SMBs is poorly represented on Internet, which is evidence of their small number on the one hand and of their being reluctant to advertise their activities on the other hand.

Mkrtumyan believes that initiative advanced last December by Chairman of the Parliamentary Commission for Science, Education, Culture, Youth and Sport Affairs Armen Ashotyan is not in line with the present-day trends to the Internet liberalization.

According to the parliamentarian’s proposal, only Armenian citizens are to be allowed to get their domains registered in the .am zone, whereas most of the countries do not impose any restrictions on domain registration.

“If the domain registration is restricted to Armenian citizens, what about the users from the Armenian Diaspora or companies like Microsoft, IM, Sony, which want and have the right to have domains in the .am zone?” Mkrtumyan asked.

If the reason for the initiative is the websites registered by nonresidents and libeling Armenia, necessary legal sanctions can be applied against them, including closedown because the domains in the .am zone are under Armenia’s jurisdiction.

Experts say that about 3,000 websites are operating in the .am zone, with many of them being local and Armenian-language ones. –0--